I am a bit bummed that I saw too late Mark Lennard's post that Bruce is doing a lecture in the Bay Area. (Mark, how was it?) I saw him once at the Long Now when he was talking about Singularity. He was speculating whether instead of at the dawn of something big like Singularity we are experiencing Technobesity a glut of technology that we are less and less capable to absorb.

The days are getting shorter, the evenings darker, the babies sleep longer :-), the wait and the way to long summer break is over. Next Friday the 6th of October finally a new Future Salon with Bruce Cahan:

The ESP Game was developed by Luis von
Ahn, a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He
developed the game to try to help solve the problems associated with
searching for images on the Web.

Currently, search engines use the names of image files and
words around them to find images. Computers are not very good at
distinguishing images from each other using visual cues. Humans,
however, are great at this, and von Ahn’s game puts that power to work.
While people entertain themselves, they are also helping to label the
hundreds of thousands or more images on the Web, which will in turn
make searching for images more efficient.II

I am a bit disappointed how few changes or additions they did:

Where is autofill? It's a natural enhancement especially for bad spellers like me.

I should be able to select a category: For example cars. Once selected I would get all the pictures that are labeleddd in the first round with car and as an enthusiast I would know it is for example a Citroen DS 1966

How about showing country competitions? Of course only if you give Google that information. That would be sweet.

Oh may be in the next releases. So far it is just some Google look and feel difference, which is a bit disappointing. Where is your creativity Google? (via TechCrunch)